In 2008, I spent three weeks in Oxford. I was going to say it’s well-documented on this blog, but that’s a lie, actually; I’d love to pull some travel posts out of the 2,000+ pictures I have from that time, many of which I still like. I do however mention it a fair bunch.

What I don’t think I’ve ever talked about is the two weeks I spent wondering if I could maybe — possibly — if it might be viable for me to find a job, and stay.

At the time, I had a laptop, and I had my fandom corners and friends online, but I didn’t have a blog, or a shop, or anything resembling income. I didn’t have any work experience either, and I’d never in my life written a CV. I’m sure people used Skype at the time, but my mom and I talked by phone. Internationally. I’m pretty sure she ran up a three-digit bill.

Oxford wasn’t a perfect experience by any means; I had to attend an ESL course I didn’t feel I was getting anything out of, and I was put up with a host family that I got along with so poorly everyone was relieved when I was moved to a flatshare for my last week. That flatshare was in Jericho, which is a ten-minute walk to the very middle of Oxford — possibly the middle of Oxford itself; I’m not that familiar with what falls where geographically — and it was the biggest room I’ve ever been in, and maybe my favorite week of my life, perhaps second to the week my best friend was here in London last year, the first week I was here — and even then there were stressors because I had to flathunt and wasn’t exactly swimming in savings.

Oxford suited me in a way I’ve never felt any other place suit me before. I felt at peace there. I was on my own, but I didn’t feel it. I wanted to stay. I really did.

I just didn’t know how to, so I moved back to Spain.

Fast-forward six years, or wait: let’s have a little montage of those six years first. Started an English degree in my hometown in Spain; dropped out as I couldn’t afford the tuition. Proceeded to spend five years at home, going out of the house maybe once a month, once every few months, to the library or when I had to buy something, which was rare because my family was pretty damn poor and I had the internet to keep me company. I wrote a lot of fanfic and I wallowed and my anxiety got so bad I eventually asked my GP for antidepressants. Those helped. In August 2012, I started paroxetine and quit writing. I tried to sell bits and bobs on eBay. Then in December, I opened a photography print shop on Etsy.

My laptop was on its last breath, and I couldn’t blog, or design, or do any of the things I was now realizing might be a viable career — the only career in a job market where the only available positions ever were door-to-door salesmen; a job market where a street-long queue waited to give in their CVs for a retail job that popped up behind my building once. I ran a crowdfunding campaign, one of the most stressful experiences of my life, bar having to pay rent and flathunt. New laptop led to this blog (with help from my friends, and with help from a specific friend for the hosting of this site as well), and then, on my birthday, I opened a design shop. November 2013. I was 24 at that time.

I started thinking about taking the leap to London. My laptop allowed me a movable source of income, a growing source of income, and my best friend started planning a trip to London to see her friend Ashley, who was doing a semester abroad here. My home life had been a toxic environment for a long time, and even though I could have saved up further, I knew if I waited, not only would I not see my best friend for god knows how long (we first met face to face in London in 2008, for one morning) but I’d never have the courage to jump on a plane on my own and book a hotel on my own and start flathunting on my own.

So I booked a flight, and I booked train tickets to Madrid. I bought a suitcase and got another from a friend of my mom’s. And I came here thinking, well, if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. I may only be here a week.

–

It’s been eleven months, and sometimes I’m so proud of myself for having made it this far. Sometimes, however, there are weeks like this week, where I need to flathunt and I’m still broke and my anxiety isn’t triggered by my toxic living environment but my financial stressors, constantly. I keep breaking down.

But I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to move back to Spain; I don’t want to leave England. Not for long, and not for home, not when summer’s approaching — braincell-killer summer in Spain; so much nicer and more productive in the UK for a photographer and model! — and it’s my parents’ turn to host my grandma, so I wouldn’t even have a room of my own there.

For the first months I was here, I skyped my mom daily. I fell into a bit of a depression hole in October and it went down to several times a week, once a week, sometimes longer periods without. My wifi fails and it frustrates me when I’m already doing badly with my mental health. But we still communicate — through twitter DMs, of all places. No huge phone bill is run, and I get to see my darling cat up on the screen, sometimes, though I miss him most of all because I can’t exactly communicate with him.

I’ve thought about going to Europe, finding cheaper places and traveling a little, for blog content, because it may well be cheaper than living in London for much longer, because maybe I’d eventually be close enough to Spain to visit my back and do it all over again.

I don’t know if I have the strength, but I’m thinking about it. And after that, maybe I’d be making enough to live in Belsize Park again, or give up the London thing and go back to Oxford.

Either way, this entire thing couldn’t have happened six years ago, and if I didn’t have the Internet none of this would have worked. I’ll refer you to the contents of my bag on that train from Stansted to London, and the person who took that picture — someone I met online a full decade ago.

—

I wrote this post for the Second Time Lucky campaign with Ocean Finance. I’m hoping they can help me get back on my feet, and have a clearer head when I consider options like ‘move to Berlin for a month because it’s cheaper there and you’ve always wanted to go to Germany, self, don’t front, you’d swoon in the little towns and take all of the selfies.’

Also in partnership with Legal & General. My entire income comes from cameras, laptops, blogs — technology has basically changed my life for the better, and given me options where there would have been none otherwise.

I’ll begin to put out normal content tomorrow, but today, you get this.

At some point I thought home and didn’t stop till I left and I haven’t felt that way since. Here in London I’ve had moments where I felt exhilarated, moments I felt incandescently happy, but it hasn’t been quite the happiness that Oxford instilled in me. I never wanted to leave. If it had been me today, this person who’s managed to survive this long in London — I would have made it work for me. But I was so far from me today back then.

A Few Things I Miss

By Lix Hewett, Age 24 And 3 Quarters

1. My cat. He’s in Spain and I’m living in London and his name is Oxford. His name explains a lot of things about me. It hints that I’ve romanticized England a little bit, in my head and my heart and my memory. It hints that even though it feels impossible right now, London may not be where I want to set down roots. But mostly it reminds me that I wanted to live here since I was in Oxford six years ago now, the first time I met my best friend in person, the strange summer weather, iced vanilla lattes and sitting in a coffee shop with a book, the time I found a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets without two bricks’ worth of notes weighing them down, walking in the Botanic Garden and forgetting the flies as they flew past me and still having some faith in the educational system, the loveliness of the big old buildings, the sunset over Jericho and the thought of fall.

2. My childhood. This is a tricky one. More than once in my life I’ve had the thought of going back in time and I never wanted to unlearn my lessons, the realities and priorities I carry with me that shape who I am and how I feel and why I do. The further away I steer from the starting point, the harder it is to believe that I was ever without them, that I could have walked down another path and been influenced by different people. But sometimes depression weighs me down, and I wish I could leave my life in my parents’ hands again, trust them to keep a roof over my head and answer the door to strangers and tell me I’m all right as I am but here’s how I could be better, no pressure, all your choice, step by step, which I never got from my parents but I did get, eventually, off people I met on the Internet.

That’s what I never want to lose. I worry if I went back in time I might not do what I did, not every single bit, and lose them. And even though it’s a nice thought

3. Not getting angry when the world doesn’t listen and

4. Not getting angry at every little bit of bullshit, I don’t want to not be someone who acknowledges her failings and the ways she has it easy and will actually put her massive ego aside to support those who don’t because I’m only as important as the next human being and I neither need nor want more of that and I’m only as good as the choices I make every day with my time and my little reach, the only things I’m secure enough in – have enough of – to give away.

5. Financial stability. The illusion of it would work.

6. Chocolate. It’s only been a few days, but the weather’s got cold and I don’t have any and I need.

7. Being an only child, because eighteen years ago may be just long enough ago on the timeline for the things I miss to be real, solid and not slipping away even in the nostalgia-walled fantasies I sometimes have before I go to sleep, where no stranger in the night – human or thing or thought – can ever get to me before first getting through my parents,

8. Believing that there’s someone in the world who can protect you from anything, infallibly;

9. Believing my heart is safe on my sleeve;

10. Wrapping my feelings in words and making poetry with it all, so here’s a silly — but heartfelt — tablet attempt at it.

Or maybe you did! The original title for this post was “10 Things You May Have Missed About Me,” but that sounded unnecessarily snarky. Plus, “10 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” is probably better for SEO. Yes, I think about those things. I also had a brief internal debate about using a video cap for this post rather than a proper quality picture from my Canon. This feels fitting, is more recent than the “good” pictures I had, and I asked Twitter and Twitter said “go with it,” so there we go. That’s thing zero.

1. I have been to London before (twice) and I loved it, but Oxford truly stole my heart. If I could pick a place to live for the rest of my life, to be based in, it would be Oxford. It’s gorgeous, it appeals to my love of culture, and it’s easy enough to get around in. It’s also just an inexpensive bus ride away from London.

I thought about this a lot last year when I was first seriously considering moving to the UK. I spent a lot of time on job ad websites looking for work all over the UK, and the truth is, Oxford didn’t have much at all going for it in that department, and it was nearly as expensive as London. I considered Glasgow for a long time as well, because I know someone there and my friend Annemari, who I want to move in with, liked it, but I’ve never been to Scotland, so London felt a lot less scary.

That said, writing this post is making me seriously consider expanding my flat search to Oxford. It’s just… heaven for me. It’s beautiful. I only wrote it off because I thought I’d be looking for a full-time job, and now what I really want to do is take my freelance work for a spin.

I hated the room I was put up in (another scholarship), the airline lost my luggage, I spent the first weekend there waiting for it, I was switched to a student house my last week, and at the end I missed my flight, my train and the bus back home from Madrid and I had to get a hostel room there. It was still a blissful trip.

2. [TW for creepiness] One day when I was in London the first time, in September of 2007, when I was seventeen, I was journaling on a bench in Green Park and some dude approached me and started talking to me. I kept trying to get rid of him; he kept going on about how age was just a number and I had kissable lips and other similarly disgusting things. He pretty much spoke in clichés, and he was Italian, and he was not even remotely attractive to me. I told him I wasn’t interested but he wouldn’t leave. So eventually I said I had to leave and I hid in the tube station until it was time to go to the showing of Wicked I had tickets for.

I went back home at 11 PM after that show. I was staying in North London and Wicked was (is?) on at the Apollo Victoria, so quite a tube ride away. I was wary of walking around London at night, especially the walk from the Bounds Green tube station to the residential neighborhood house my ESL school (a scholarship requirement) had put me up in, but Victoria was a busy area and the show was worth it.

3. Most of the modeling I’ve done since I started calling myself a model has been self-portraiture, or close to it; I model for my mom, but my mom is not a photographer — she simply follows my instructions. Oftentimes I set up the shot entirely, make sure the shutter speed is really high, and move around as she keeps the shooting button pressed. It’s incredibly fun. I don’t consider myself “model pretty,” whatever that is, and I don’t have amazing hair, and I’m not tall enough for the catwalk. I don’t have beauty instincts. But I love the hell out of it.

4. Despite #3, it is not true that I have never modeled for someone else who was comfortable with a camera. It was just for fun, but I got some gorgeous shots out of it (shots I call mine because a- I haven’t spoken to him in ages, b- modeling is an art, c- it was my camera, and d- I did all the post-processing, but they were very much collaborative work), and the realization that it was an absolute blast to play-act for the camera. This was a friend who eventually “broke up” with me friendship-wise because he thought I only used him for pictures. He… may have been right?

I’ve got makeup on in most of those many, many shots because I went out of the house and I used to always put on makeup when I went out of the house. I’ve even got a shoot inspired by a The Birds still I saw in Vanity Fair — shame about the setting (my building foyer at night, flash and no tripod), but I can sure work the horror vibe.

5. I asked to be seen by a psychologist once. He wrote in all caps, chalked up my social anxiety mess of a dorm experience to separation anxiety, wanted me to admire my abusive father, and brought my mom in with me. His tentative diagnosis was anxiety disorder, paranoia, psychosis, and Asperger’s syndrome. My psychosis is entirely passive, which wasn’t specified, but otherwise I think the diagnosis, unlike the methodology, session and his “day hospital” (going to and staying in the hospital for various therapy things, mostly group, every day from 8 to 5) prescription, was on the mark.

In other words, I’ve got paranoia coming out of my ears and I tend to avoid people. I don’t need to be warned; my brain is a scaredy cat all by itself.

6. I don’t have any formal creative education. For a long time I was a writer first and foremost, and I’ve got very strong opinions about writing that most creative writing courses would have clashed with hard. I did want to take a photography course for a long time, but I wasn’t sure how they worked and I was scared they’d be too technical; I wasn’t ready for technical photography learning back then. It may sound like an oxymoron, but I didn’t feel I knew enough to learn more! (I do now.)

For the most part, I just didn’t have money for classes (I would have hired a guitar teacher earlier if so, or gone for ballet, or for gymnastics as of 2012), and I couldn’t find any that appealed to me. Now I’ve got tons thanks to Skillshare and the like, but I still can’t afford them! And I’m not sure I can make the time for them right now, so I learn bit by bit with free tutorials, videos and experimenting.

7. Back to writing, though, I used to write mainly fanfic and poetry — fanfic on a regular basis, poetry whenever I was really depressed. I’ve got a self-published poetry e-book out (it’s available on Kobo and Smashwords, and translated to Spanish as well if you’re curious!), and I always meant to publish a second tome with my more recent work, which I’m prouder of than the stuff in the e-book, but then I opened that photography shop on Etsy and my Internet life (and career goals) did a 180.

8. I’ve done NaNoWriMo something like four times? I won the first year with 50,000 words of drivel barely 20% into my novel, and failed every year since. This project was my last. I wrote a little bit of it.

9. I got started on graphic design when I was fourteen and got Paint Shop Pro. I upgraded to Photoshop Elements a couple of years after, and got used to it quickly. I didn’t do much with it, though — mostly coloring screencaps for fandom and tumblr posts! Guess what, bloggers who aren’t in fandom: I know howtomakegifs. It was a pain in the ass on my old laptop, though, and I haven’t had a reason to try on the new one yet. It’s not really satisfying creative work. More like frustrating and annoying, especially when you have to keep the filesize small enough for tumblr standards — which used to be even stricter than they are now.

10. Sometimes I post sillythings on youtube for the benefit of my best friend. And before Instagram (and sometimes even now), I posted a lot of silly Photo Booth pics of me and my cat to Twitter as well. Have a browse and enjoy.

I’m joining Bonnie for Travel Tuesday today! Bit of a spur of the moment post, but I went into one of my folders at random and my vague “maybe I’ll do Travel Tuesday” idea immediately became a fun, easy theme to write a post around.

These were all taken on or near Bevington Road in Oxford. And I’m feeling very “I wish I were there” about it all again.

For today’s Travel Tuesday, I’m sharing shots taken from a window — again. Today’s batch comes from a single window: the one in the room I stayed in the first couple of weeks I was in Oxford. I was put up with a host family, and I spent the entire first weekend indoors because the airline lost my luggage and it didn’t occur to anyone to let me borrow some clothes while I waited for it. (In fact, the woman who lived there attempted to sell me a party tank top she’d bought as a gift for a relative. Welcoming. She also thought it was unhygienic to let me borrow a towel, so instead she gave me two tiny kitchen towels to dry off after I showered. Some of the many reasons I complained and got moved!)

Today’s post has a soundtrack: I got So Long, Marianne (originally by Leonard Cohen, this cover by John Cale and Suzanne Vega) stuck in my head while I was picking out pics.

It also turned out I underestimated my habit of taking pictures out of windows, so there’s going to be a part 2 next week featuring shots taken from static windows. This post? Is all shots taken from planes and buses. There may also be a part 3 featuring shots taken from a bus from Oxford to London and back, too, because I didn’t touch that folder. You’re welcome.

Linking up with Belinda and Bonnie for Travel Tuesday again! I’m still figuring out how I want to approach these posts — there’s a lot I want to share with you from my absolutely, ridiculously large collection of pictures from the three weeks I spent in Oxford, England years ago. Having these regular posts saves me from having to narrow it down, which I plain old suck at doing — if you’ve known me for any length of time, you know decision-making is the opposite of my thing — but I’m still torn between going for themes like “street signs” and “airports” and “suburbs” and “strangers’ children,” or places like the Botanic Garden and Christ Church College and the Marine Parade and this neighborhood or that street (see where it gets complicated?), or taking you on tours of my actual days, or some combination or all of the above.

I’m also not sure how many pictures I should include in a post, which doesn’t help any. What do y’all think? Kindly indulge my obsessive tendencies and give me some advice.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing something that fits all of the above categories: it’s a single place (Kidlington, a village outside Oxford, where I stayed with a host family for two weeks before the school I booked this with deigned to move me), a single walk around it (when I accidentally got on the wrong bus and got off a length from the aforementioned host family’s house), and it rather fits the suburbs theme I mentioned above.

Today’s Blogtember prompt asks: If you could take three months off from your current life and do anything in the world, what would you do?

The truth is, I don’t need three months off from my life. I’ve had several years off from it! I’m not tied up or weighed down by work, education, significant others, children or any sort of hometown love or pride. If I left, I’d miss my sister and my mom and my cat, but that’s about it. My problem is I can’t afford to fund most of what I’m going to do.

So here’s the question I’m going to answer: If money weren’t an issue, how would you change your life?

The answer is really easy: I would rent an apartment, jump on a plane, and move to the UK with my best friend.